Patrick Buckridge Patrick Buckridge i(A24093 works by) (a.k.a. Pat Buckridge; Patrick James Buckridge)
Born: Established: 1947
c
Australia,
c
;
Gender: Male
The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.

Works By

Preview all
1 Writing the Irish-Australian Self : Life-Writers and Irish Stereotypes, 1870-2000 Patrick Buckridge , 2021 single work criticism
— Appears in: Australian Literary Studies , vol. 36 no. 2 2021;

'This article surveys the history of Irish-Australian autobiography and memoir as a form of writing particularly well adapted to exploring the tensions and compromises of Irish-Australian identity. It draws on selected works published from the early colonial period to the end of the twentieth century written by men and women across a wide social spectrum, from archbishops, politicians and academics to bushrangers, barmaids and poets. It focuses on the process of self-construction at work in the writing, with particular attention to the ways in which contemporaneous Irish stereotypes are invoked, often rejected, and sometimes embraced as part of this process. The tentative suggestion is made that a balanced appreciation of this form of writing may have been hindered by a bias evident in much recent Irish-Australian historiography towards interpreting the historical relationship between the Irish diaspora and the dominant Australian culture in conflictual terms, and that the strong impulse towards friendly assimilation, an equally important part of the historical record, deserves equal recognition.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

1 Yvonne Smith, David Malouf and the Poetic : His Earlier Writings Patrick Buckridge , 2021 single work review
— Appears in: JASAL , vol. 21 no. 1 2021;

— Review of David Malouf and the Poetic : His Earlier Writings Yvonne Smith , 2017 multi chapter work criticism
1 Life-Writing and Diaspora II : The Autobiographical Writings of the Irish in Britain and Australia Patrick Buckridge , Liam Harte , 2018 single work criticism
— Appears in: A History of Irish Autobiography 2018; (p. 331-347)

'There is no more common Irish journey than that made by generations of people ‘across the water’ to Great Britain. A complex set of factors, from the countries’ geographical proximity to the colonial nature of their historical relationship, combine to ensure that Irish migration to Britain ‘comprises a very large, very special case’.  Australia, too, has claims to exceptionalism as a receptor of Irish migrants. Oliver MacDonagh proposes three respects in which the Irish-Australian diaspora differs from its counterparts in Britain and North America: its historically high percentage of the total population of the new country, its very even demographic distribution and the somewhat special status of the Irish as a ‘founding people’, arriving in Australia – mainly as convicts and soldiers – at the beginning of its European colonization, thereby exercising a potentially stronger influence over the shape and destiny of the new nation than the other Irish emigrations could hope to achieve. Although points of commonality co-exist with these markers of difference – particularly for Catholic Irish migrants, who have a shared historical experience of being a denigrated out-group in both countries – any joint examination of the autobiographical writings of the Irish in Britain and Australia must expect the contrasts to eclipse the correspondences. Yet, as this chapter will show, despite being shaped by highly distinctive diasporic histories and sociocultural conditions, these respective literary corpuses reveal certain narrative preoccupations that illuminate the shifting meanings of home and belonging for those whose identities are forged across boundaries and heritages.' (Introduction)

1 Review of Required Reading : Literature in Australian Schools Since 1945, Edited by Tim Dolin, Jo Jones and Patricia Dowsett. Patrick Buckridge , 2018 single work essay
— Appears in: Australian Literary Studies , February vol. 33 no. 1 2018;

— Review of Required Reading : Literature in Australian Schools since 1945 2017 anthology criticism

'Like the teaching of history, the teaching of literature in Australian secondary schools – the ‘how’ as well as the ‘what’ – has, for the last twenty years or so, been a topic of intermittent controversy in the media; to a much lesser extent, one gathers, in the schools themselves, where a majority of English teachers seem either happy or resigned to be singing from the same songbook, with only occasional peeps of protest at the inexorable displacement of traditional literary studies by cultural studies, with the various losses that entails. A comprehensive history of the treatment of literature in Australian schools would therefore be very welcome as a way of placing some context around the recent changes.' (Introduction)

1 Picking up the Pieces: The Nambour Chronicle and the Construction of a Regional Reading Culture, 1920–50 Patrick Buckridge , 2017 single work essay
— Appears in: Queensland Review , December vol. 24 no. 2 2017; (p. 30 -318)

'Given that the Sunshine Coast and its hinterland have been, at least for a time, the haunt of several of several eminent Australian writers — the Palmers, Dark, Herbert, Astley, Wright, Cato, Williamson and Carey, to name a few — it seemed worth asking whether the principal, and for most of the twentieth century the only, newspaper servicing the region since 1903 — the Nambour Chronicle and the North Coast Advertiser — was part of a literary culture to which these writers felt they belonged and were contributing in the first half of the century. If not, why not? And if so, what kinds of contributions did it make to that culture? The tentative finding is that while the Chronicle did not make the kinds of direct, ‘homegrown’ contributions that some other metropolitan and provincial newspapers did, it maintained a literary presence and function by means of a regular diet of imported features, and by its particularly close and consistent relationship with the Nambour Town Library (and also, less consistently, with various School of Arts libraries in the district). The continuing connection between these two Nambour institutions — the Chronicle and the library — was personal and familial as well as civic in nature, and clearly suited the literary demands and expectations of a highly dispersed community that found its unity and identity by other means.' (Abstract)

1 Colin Bingham, The Telegraph and Poetic Modernism in Brisbane between the Wars Patrick Buckridge , 2016 single work criticism
— Appears in: Queensland Review , vol. 23 no. 2 2016; (p. 151-163)
'Brisbane has sometimes been represented as a bulwark of literary traditionalism against the advances of poetic modernism in the southern capitals during the first half of the twentieth century. But as William Hatherell showed in The Third Metropolis, modernism had a brief but intense flourishing in the northern city during and immediately after World War II. This article traces the reception and practice of poetic modernism in Brisbane even earlier than that, in the period between the wars, both in the form of a vigorous critical debate over ‘modernistic poetry’ in the Courier-Mail and elsewhere, and also in the composition and publication of a significant quantity of self-consciously modernist poetry in Brisbane's evening daily, the Telegraph, with the active encouragement of the paper's literary editor, Colin Bingham, from 1930 to 1939.' (Introduction)
1 ‘Something That Makes Us Ponder’ : A Virtual Book Club in Central Queensland, 1928–38 Patrick Buckridge , 2015 single work criticism
— Appears in: Queensland Review , June vol. 22 no. 1 2015; (p. 15-29)
'When considering the question of reading provision in remote regions, Australian historians have tended to focus on the challenge of distributing books and other reading matter affordably across vast and sparsely populated areas. In the back-blocks of Western Queensland between the wars, however, the problem of distribution had been addressed with some success: by mail orders to metropolitan book retailers, subsidised postal rates, local Schools of Arts libraries, the Workers’ Educational Association and, above all, the efficient operations of the Queensland Bush Book Club, which performed extraordinary feats of remote distribution throughout the interwar period. Isolated booklovers could almost take for granted a steady — if somewhat limited and belated — supply of books to read. Two things they could not take for granted, however, were reliable, disinterested and informed advice about what books to choose (where choice was available) and — even more important — the opportunity to share their reading experiences with others. Walter Murdoch once said, ‘It is a basic fact that when you have read a book you want to talk about it.’ That may overstate the case a little, but there is no doubt that the desire to communicate the pleasures, occasional disappointments and sense of discovery in reading books — no matter how solitary the reading experience itself may have been — was and is very strong and widespread, and that single families or households did not then (and do not now) necessarily provide congenial environments for such ‘book talk’.' (Publication abstract)
1 Kelly, Paul (1947- ) Patrick Buckridge , 2014 single work companion entry
— Appears in: A Companion to the Australian Media : K 2014; (p. 231)
1 Rescuing Reading : Strategies for Arresting the Decline of Reading in Western Australian Newspapers between the Wars Patrick Buckridge , 2014 single work criticism
— Appears in: Australian Literary Studies , October vol. 29 no. 3 2014; (p. 101-115)
'The purpose of this essay is to describe and interpret a cluster of three readerly 'entertainments' conducted in two Perth newspapers, The Western Mail and the est Australian, in the years 1929-1930, and to place them in contexts that enable us to understand them as calculated and connected interventions in a wider campaign of resistance to what was perceived as a decline in recreational reading in this period.' (Introduction, 101)
1 Going Forward to the Past : The Future of Literary Studies in Australian Universities Patrick Buckridge , 2014 single work criticism
— Appears in: Queensland Review , June vol. 21 no. 1 2014; (p. 4-16)
'The imminent death of the study of past literature in Australian universities has been pronounced many times since the 1980s. It seems to have been taking several decades to die, but its time may finally be upon us. When I first joined Griffith Humanities in 1981, the then Head of School, David Saunders, told me that though he might wish it otherwise, the literature of the past would always be studied in universities — if only because there was so much of it and because, like Everest, it was simply ‘there’. I now think he may have been wrong. It is likely enough, in my view, that some — mainly older — people will keep reading, studying and discussing the literary tradition for a long time to come: in reading groups, U3A classes and the like. More about that later. But I doubt if anyone will be doing it in Australian universities for very much longer.' (Publication abstract)
1 Book Review : The World Last Night Patrick Buckridge , 2013 single work review
— Appears in: Queensland Review , June vol. 20 no. 1 2013; (p. 126-129)

— Review of The World Last Night M. T. C. Cronin , 2012 selected work poetry
1 Remaking an ‘Old Tradition's Magic’ : The Irish Strain in Early Queensland Writing Belinda McKay , Patrick Buckridge , 2013 single work criticism
— Appears in: Queensland Review , June vol. 20 no. 1 2013; (p. 110-125)

'The themes of cultural dislocation and the struggle to feel ‘at home’ in a new land figure prominently in Australian literature, and considerable critical attention has been devoted to the distinctive articulations of these preoccupations by well-known writers of Irish birth or descent, such as Victor Daley, Bernard O'Dowd and John O'Brien. Queensland's Irish writers, however, have been largely forgotten or overlooked — both individually and as a group.' (Publication summary)

1 Australia's World Literature : Constructing Australia's Global Reading Relations in the Interwar Period Patrick Buckridge , Eleanor Morecroft , 2013 single work criticism
— Appears in: Scenes of Reading : Is Australian Literature a World Literature? 2013; (p. 47-59)

'Recent scholarship on the international dimensions of Australian literature has tended to focus on the ways in which Australian writers adopted and adapted overseas models, and demonstrated overseas influences in their work, or, conversely, on the extent to which Australian books were able to reach international readerships. Our concern, however, is with the larger, more diffuse phenomenon of overseas reading by Australian readers, and what we want to suggest is that Australia's 'world reading' in the interwar period - its people's efforts to engage with the rest of the world, affectively and intellectually, through the reading of non-Australian books - might be framed by seeing those efforts as being partly a constructive and outwardly directed, but at the same time self-protective, cultural response to a growing awareness of instability, threat and uncertainty in the world, and by a sense of the danger to which Australia's geographical isolation and cultural inwardness exposed it' (p. 51).

1 Pacifying Brisbane : The Muses' Magazine and the 1920s Patrick Buckridge , 2012 single work criticism
— Appears in: Republics of Letters : Literary Communities in Australia 2012; (p. 39-51)
'Patrick Buckridge reveals the extraordinary number of literary and cultural societies that flourished in Brisbane in the 1920s, contributing to what he describes as 'the active creation of a liberal polity' during the otherwise turbulent interwar period. Despite this apparently local focus, many, indeed most, of these societies, as their names indicate, were affiliated with wider forms of imagined community : L'Alliance Francaise, the Brisbane Shakespeare Society, Der Brisbane Goeth Bund.' (Kirkpatrick, Peter and Dixon, Robert: Introduction xiii)
1 Encounters with Trees : A Life with Leaves in the Brisbane Suburbs Patrick Buckridge , 2012 single work criticism
— Appears in: Queensland Review , December vol. 19 no. 2 2012; (p. 173-177)
1 Books as Gifts : The Meaning and Function of a Personal Library Patrick Buckridge , 2012 single work criticism
— Appears in: Australian Literary Studies , October-November vol. 27 no. 3/4 2012; (p. 59-73)

'Much of the evidence used in researching the history of individuals' reading preferences and practices i elusive and transient. Most individuals to not leave material traces - why would they? - of an activity which nonetheless, in many cases, occupies a significant proportion of their waking lives; and the traces that some of them do leave are often enigmatic or ambiguous. The 'personal library', however - by which I mean a collection of books acquired over a period of time by a specific individual (as distinct from a family or an institution) - may reasonably be regarded with some optimism as a potentially rich source of information, at least about that individual's reading history, and perhaps also about wider patterns of reading behavior which he or she may exemplify.' (Author's introduction)

1 Harmonising the City : Music, Multiculturalism and The Muses' Magazine in Brisbane Patrick Buckridge , 2011 single work criticism
— Appears in: Queensland Review , January vol. 18 no. 1 2011; (p. 26-41)
'Brisbane in the 1920s certainly had its tense moments, but what struck me most forcibly in browsing the local newspapers from the period was how successfully political and social conflicts were absorbed into the peaceful, civil and law-abiding fabric of Brisbane life. World-altering events like the Russian Revolution, the Armistice and the Treaty of Versailles, the Irish Troubles and the rise of Mussolini were reported and discussed in the press and elsewhere, but matters seldom went further than that despite the real potential — given the presence of significant Russian, German, Irish and Italian minorities in the city's population — for ‘imported’ tensions. Even the momentous political developments that occurred in Brisbane in the early 1920s, when the state government's efforts to secure foreign loans were sabotaged by an opposition-funded delegation to London, and the Premier, EG (‘Red Ted’) Theodore, forced the parliamentary upper house to terminate its own existence, failed to polarise or fracture the community to any significant degree.' (Publication summary)
1 1 The Harp in the South : Reading Ireland in Australia Patrick Buckridge , 2011 single work criticism
— Appears in: The Oxford History of the Irish Book, Volume V 2011; (p. 440-461)

'The Australian branch of the modern Irish diaspora has several apparently distinctive features, when compared with the British, American and Canadian branches. As explained by the historian Oliver MacDonagh, these include, firstly, its large size in relation to the total population – over 30% in the eastern mainland states, and sustained at that level down to the First World War and beyond; secondly, its unusually uniform distribution around the country, geographically, socially and even occupationally, with relatively strong Irish presences in all states, and in all classes and occupations (except the higher financial professions), but notably the law, politics, journalism and teaching; and thirdly their unique position within the diaspora,as a founding people, arriving at the beginning of European settlement (mainly as convicts and soldiers), and thereby staking a claim, and an interest, in the shape and destiny of the nation as a whole.' (Author's introduction)

1 Review Patrick Buckridge , 2010 single work review
— Appears in: Queensland Review , vol. 17 no. 2 2010; (p. 101-103)

— Review of Brisbane Matthew Condon , 2010 single work prose
1 Introduction to Tom Hurstbourne or A Squatter's Life Patrick Buckridge , 2010 single work criticism
— Appears in: Queensland Review , vol. 17 no. 1 2010; (p. 11-14)
X